


The Kitty Doth Protest Too Much

by takethembystorm



Series: Tea Break [23]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, chat utterly fails at being able to take it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-08-16 15:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8108089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takethembystorm/pseuds/takethembystorm
Summary: In a hundred years, Chat would never have used the term "seductress" to describe Marinette.





	1. High Score

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://my-insanity-is-an-artform.tumblr.com/post/143451410449).

“What’s the matter, kitty?” Marinette says.

Purrs would be a better adjective, Chat thinks as she slinks up next to him, stretching lithely before settling down into a lounge that draws his attention toward her—he snaps his eyes up and away.

He hears her giggle, and flushes.

 _Damn_ it. He’s a freaking superhero. He walks around in a freaking skin-tight bodysuit for crying out loud, he should _not_ be flustered by freaking Marinette Dupain-Cheng of all people. It’s like being terrified of _Juleka_. Or a _hamster._  


He swallows and tries to ignore the way in which her smile widens at the sound. “Nothing,” he says, his voice a little higher-pitched than it ought to be. “Everything’s just dandy. Fine.”

“Are you _sure?”_ Marinette says, laying a hand lightly on his arm.

 _Okay. That_ was new.

He tries to keep his breathing under control as his attention shifts to the light pressure of her fingertips on his arm, the gentle warmth pulsing through them as she shifts slightly, the light scrape of her fingernails as she walks her fingers up his arm, until they’re resting now on his shoulder.

“Yes,” he croaks, as her hand moves to caress the back of his neck.

“You don’t seem fine, kitty,” she murmurs, shifting closer until her hip brushes his. “You seem tense. Maybe a massage would help?”

“Maybe,” he shoots back, feebly.

Marinette flushes a little, her hand pausing in its movements.

“Well,” she says after a second. “You’d need to take off that suit of yours, of course.”

And Chat Noir, exeunt stage right.

“Wow, look at the time,” he says, taking one smart step sideways and hopping onto the railing. “Things to do, people to save, life of a superhero never ends, good night, Princess.”

He leaps away before Marinette can try anything else.  


Night 100. Marinette v. Chat, 99 to 1.  



	2. Game Over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's only so much tension a wire can take before it snaps.

Adrien doesn’t know why he keeps visiting.

Night after night after night, he visits and sits and listens to those poisonous words slip sweetly from her lips as she trails touches along his arm.

“Kitty.”

“My knight.”

“My hero.”

A half-dozen other names besides, all of them personal and loving and affectionate, and all of them lies like razor blades shoved beneath his fingernails.

He’d seen her reaction when he’d first started showing up, seen in her smile and sudden tense posture the face he put on for the world in the mirror day after day. And then she’d taken all the supposition and guesswork out of that when she’d opened her mouth.

“What are you doing here, kitty?”

Not said with surprise or concern or even something so charitable as gentle reproof, but annoyance and scorn.

But she’d been kind to him nonetheless in the manner of saints tending to beggars. She’d fed him and talked with him and kept him company past the lonely hours of the night. And she’d done so the night after, and the night after that, and so on, long past anything he deserved.

He doesn’t quite know when he’d fallen for that patience, that kindness.

But this was simple cruelty, even if in jest.

He loved her--loves her--and Adrien Agreste does not do things by halves. He’d sign over his entire fortune, hand her the world on a chain, die for her, _kill_ for her, if she needs it.

But she doesn’t love him. Cares for him, maybe, but she flirts for his reaction, not for his attention.

Story of his life, really.

“Kitty?” Marinette asks quietly. For once the word isn’t framed with seductive lace and diaphanous silks. It’s a simple query. He can handle that.

“Yes?”

“You’re quiet,” she says. “What’s the matter?”

He smiles wanly at her. “It’s nothing, Princess.”

“No it isn’t,” she says, touching him lightly on the arm. He feels the heat of her fingers through the suit, and flinches away from it.

Marinette pauses for a moment. “No,” she says slowly. “It’s not nothing. Kitty, you’ve been quiet for what, a week now? Something’s wrong.”

She looks at him; he refuses to meet her eyes. “You know you can trust me, right?”

The sudden boiling rage overtakes him, smashes down every barrier he’d put up around the naked quivering flame of his heart, feeds it with tinder and fresh fuel and sprays the resulting blaze with gasoline.

“I can _trust_ you?” he says, his voice a low snarl. Marinette backs up a step. “Trust you with _what?_ Trust you to do _what?_ ”

“Kitty--”

Oh, that was a mistake. The word is napalm to him, and furious howling heat explodes into his lungs and guts and makes the world blurry and unfocused.

“Trust you to be _honest_ with me?” he spits. “Trust you to be honest about what we are? Trust you to be _understanding?_ When you do _this_ to me? When you take my words and mock them? When--when I give you fragments of my heart and you _stomp_ on them and hand them back to me and _laugh?”_

Marinette is suddenly hugging him, her face buried in the crook of his shoulder, and with the gentle warmth of her body comes a sudden sapping of his strength. He sinks to the floor, trembling, as she holds him tightly against her.

After a while, the tears stop.

“You meant it,” Marinette says. He feels the hum of her words against his chest and nods.

“All of it,” he replies.

“I can’t say the same,” she says after a moment.

He closes his eyes and fights down another sob. Of course. She isn’t a cat person. Of course. Of course, because it’s him. Because it’s stupid Chat Noir and stupid _Adrien_.

He ought to stop hoping.

“But I mean this now,” Marinette says, “and I’ll mean it as long as you do.”

She pulls back a little and kisses him, lightly and chastely, on the corner of his mouth, her lips little more than gentle pressure on his tear-dampened skin.

“I love you, Chat Noir,” she murmurs. “With all my heart.”

He goes stiff.

His mind races, searching through every modulation and tremor and inflection of those words for the tell, the flaw, the giveaway.

It isn’t a lie.

He swallows and buries his nose in her hair.

“I love you, too,” he says. “I love you, Marinette.”


End file.
